The heckling does not bother me, Mr. Speaker. I still want to make my point.
The point is that we have done more to address the issue at hand than the previous government did in 10 years. We need to give credit where credit is due.
At the end of the day, look at the former Conservative government. What was it able to achieve since it got a majority government? Not an inch of pipeline.
It is not as if energy east has only been here in the last three, four, or five weeks. This idea has been talked about for years. What did the former government do? Nothing. It built not an inch of pipeline when it had a majority government.
What has the Liberal government been able to achieve? In a very short timeframe, we have come up with a process, a process that Canadians can believe is going to work. If it is going to work, that means it is good for the economy and good for our environment. All we need is a chance to be able to demonstrate that.
I would suggest that there are things that have to be done. There has to be consultation. The Government of Canada is working on the consultation, whether it is with our different levels of government, our indigenous people, or others. There needs to be a collaboration of the different departments. We have witnessed that.
Most important, as I say, we have the process in place to ensure that the environment is in fact taken into consideration and to ensure that our natural resources get to market.
We in the Liberal Party acknowledge and recognize how important our natural resources are to our economy. On several occasions in question period, we heard the Minister of Natural Resources talk about their contribution to GDP of over 20%.
We understand that. We believe in the middle class, which means that we must support the industries and natural resources that are important to our country, but so is the environment. We believe that we must have a process to protect our environment.
There is the difference between us and the Conservatives. We not only believe in our economy, we believe in the environment. We need to ensure that the process that we have in place will be in the long-term best interests of our country. This is something that we have been able to achieve but the government before us failed to achieve.
So, let us give credit where credit is due.